This is the key point, I think. I've seen the same as the author: people who want to be writers but rarely read books. And I don't get it.
I recently finished a novel (now shopping around for agents, which was hard enough pre-AI but now...) and reading was integral to writing it. I know good sentences. I know the style of prose I like to read. I know how things can veer between florid and poetic and where the line is. I know how a sentence can be completely different if you read it as though it was spoken, instead of to yourself (some of mine are written to be read.)
I know the things that annoy me: dropping out to put thoughts in italics; descriptions that specify instead of evoke; characters talking without it leading somewhere. (And much more.)
How do I know this? From reading.
And I want to tell the story. It was a story that grew, that I think will anger the right people (it's not too kind to Musk or VCs or the Russian Orthodox Church), and yet is simply an adventure, tumbling our characters from situation to situation like they fell overboard while navigating rapids. Ultimately I wrote a book I wanted to read. It turned out to be about post-apocalyptic startups and sea monsters.
Someday I'll publish, I hope. And no doubt someone will read it and find style they dislike, learn from it things they don't want to do in their writing, either. But I also hope that there are moments in the book that will inspire someone else, in that they too will want to write, based on what they read.
I'm tired of hearing about the usual greats and also boor prize ones because they have good characters and good story content or shocking emotionally but are quite bland on the language front because they assume their readers have grade 5 level capacity so the sentences are simple, the vocab is basic. Thank you
I don't, but before focusing on a novel I spent the past couple of decades periodically writing short stories. There is a skill to writing, and it needs the ten thousand hours just like everything else.
But I cannot imagine doing it without reading first, and alongside.
This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing ability as I read emails and Claude output all day. Recently, I've been reading a lot of building codes and compliance documents and I've develop annoying ticks like using "shall", "need not", "take no exception", overuse of passive voice, etc.
My hypothesis is engineers suck at writing by default unless they do extra-curricular reading. I read a lot! But sadly it's often textbooks, journal papers, documentations, and Claude. I'm envious of great writers, but I don't have time to read Keats. I'm immersed in Stewart, Strang, and whatever Claude is feeding me next.
T.R. Napper explicitly states that you do in his piece:
> But I am saying this: go look at your phone, and tell me what your average screen time is per day. Two hours? Five? Seven? If so – shut up: you’ve time to read.
It doesn't have to be Keats. Start by building the habit (read in bed before sleeping!) and just read whatever you enjoy. If Keats seems like a hurdle, just pick up Pratchett or Tolkien.
You cannot read a book in 30” increments.
Its a struggle trying to "imitate the style" in writing. In music, you could keep playing all the songs in the style of your favorite artist and possible develop a close stylistic proximity to what you're imitating but in writing do you just write prose with the same wordings? i get the keep reading to develop your style but feels like adapting a style you want to master and then make your own variant is way harder in writing.
In music, you have voicing sparsity, changes in voice count, preferred pitch ranges, tension/release cadences, embellishments, richness, playfulness, and a host of other characteristics. Rachmaninoff, for example (among other things), favours active, moving octaves quite deep in the base, extremely rich chords in the middle treble, simple (local) rythymic patterns, and expanding simple ideas like repeated arpeggios into large parts of a piece. He has more voices than other pieces typical of his time, though they tend to be combined somewhat simply when contrasted with counterpoint exercises and other techniques typically involving fewer voices.
In writing, you have sentence length, sentence complexity (they're different), typical volume used to express an idea, specific word choices, whether you tend to observe concrete or abstract ideas, the level of "truth" in your statements (in many flavours -- deadpan humour being quite different from a boldfaced lie directed toward the reader), technique choice used for signposting, willingness to violate "rules," and so on. If you picked even one project proposal from me at $WORK, you could reliably separate it from those written by hundreds of other engineers just by a few quirks -- habitually providing one level of motivation deeper than is typically expressed in technical writing (not just what we're doing, but what we're not doing and why we made that choice), a tendency to use British spellings and US words, a pattern of contracting any verb tense, sometimes with multiple apostrophes (e.g., "there'll've been"), refusing to terminate a non-exhaustive list without informing the reader that it's non-exhaustive, and so on. If you look at the reasons and motivations for one of those quirks, it's that I tend to have complete ideas (in technical domains) and want to express them completely and have found that every missing detail causes eventual problems -- only tempered by the fact that the requisite length tends also to cause important details to be overlooked on a casual read, which provides a mild damper on length. Understanding that motivation makes it easy to apply it as if you were me even when you don't have concrete examples regarding specific quirk/scenario interactions.
On the contrary, you may have no idea what style means in the context of writing, so you can't fathom what imitating writing style looks like.
I honestly don't know precisely either, but a couple of things to mull over: Clarke and Asimov are said to have a "dry" style. Most of their novels are "story". On the contrary, Eco describes things in very minute detail (there's a whole chapter in "The name of the rose" that is the description of a door).
Those are examples of elements of style you may be able to reproduce and that aren't limited to wording.
I find myself rewording things to avoid claude and chatgpt-isms. You don't realize how much you say "You're absolutely right" on a day to day basis...
This is where AI concerns me for people who are juniors in their field (software or otherwise). You get quick answers which don't help with learning, and it's very easy to never read the code. It's like a very tempting drug that stunts growth but feels like progress.
At least this is what I came to find, as I have some issues currently with "blanking" more than I would like.
Another thing is that I find myself using AI-isms in daily conversations more and more the more I use them to help me code. "Load-baaring" and "not X but Y" are phrases that I actively have to catch myself to avoid using now.
LLM tropes are one thing, but before those came along you could easily see how someone working in a corporate office would pick up jargon there even if they loath it. Here on HN you can observe certain phrases and words which seem to be part of what some IT professionals use — like the horridly angular orthogonal used figuratively.
Reading prose written by writers who live outside of such bubbles (or who simply have a good editor in addition to their own filtering) is an antidote to that.
Working on stylistic issues is a conscious self improvement thing, but you leverage your many hours of reading when you're tackling that. Reading a lot means you unconsciously get good at judging which prose works well and which grates.
Then do the same deep dive for a different author. I may have made a mistake with my current choice, Jill Lepore. I can't tell whether it's her writing style or what she writes about, but it is definitely chewy.
Writing, programming, or drawing is fundamentally training on somebody else's work. Accept it, get better at it, and then move on.
Just wanted to compliment your writing. Though only a short comment, it painted a vivid picture in my mind.
> Insight #4: The best writers are the best readers. There aren’t any shortcuts around this. Successful writers read. They read a lot. And the best writers read a wide variety of books. It’s impossible to stress the importance of this insight. When aspiring authors ask my advice on making it as a writer, this is my most common first response: Read.
https://hughhowey.com/writing-insights-part-one-becoming-a-w...
> And I’m not even a good example of proper work ethic. I have friends who write, revise, edit, and publish a novel a month. Year after year. I have friends who have published over fifty novels in their first handful of years of writing. Both of my friends who publish a book a month make millions of dollars a year, and they are among the best writers I know when it comes to craft. I can’t put their books down. They pass like Messi.
That people in general don’t read, I get. But if you don’t read, why would you want to write? Baffling!
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/college-students-m...
That is NOT the same as being incapable to sit through a general movie. That does not mean they dont like film in general.
The advice of "read more to write better" is incomplete IMO. I'd change it to "read/engage critically to write better". Else reading results in memetic ideas and tonality
In fact, you'd want to read less if it means reading deeply
"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."
“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”
Yet the quality has gone down when you compare it to, say, 1600's greatest works.
Reading as a person wanting to become a better writer should be more conscience of what they are reading. I often finish a novel and can't even remember if it was narrated, or how. That is not careful reading.
I've heard of authors who, went waiting for their muse, just copied novels they liked until they got back in the groove, and this usually helped.
Practice makes practice. Deliberate practice makes...
Because from the article: > One of the key things I’ve learned is this: there’s no real blueprint.
So to me it’s saying there’s a lot of different ways to cook this stew but it always requires this ingredient
[also, I can't also think about people who I know who talk talk talk (to hear the sound of their own voice?) and never listen... is this part of what he's implying?]
I tend to mimic the author I am reading, it’s annoying.
If I change the book I read while writing something, my text changes tone in the middle.
I am not a good writer, and I don’t read that much, so maybe that trend goes away when you write a lot, but it’s a pitfall worth knowing
I know it's a very bad thing to say out loud, but if even aspiring writers, those who care so much that they go to writing workshops, have stopped reading, it's a very strong signal that writing/publishing won't be a viable profession in the near future anymore.
That said, good advice. Mediocre readers are mediocre writers. The reverse is not necessarily true. I've met many fantasy writers (hello Readercon!) who've read every damn series and then proceed to write yet another Tolkienesque knockoff. Their brains are pretty much like overtrained LLMs.
Additionally, the very next sentence is "Joking. I would never say that. But I certainly fucking think it."
Casual obscenity has become so normalized in the culture, you probably feel outraged I'm even bringing it up. Not reading has also become normalized in just the same manner. No one reads if they can at all help it-- not at work, not in parks, not on the commute, and not for writing. Their loss, of course.
We found it because of HN, but his audience - the only one's who's opinion he should give a shit about - are his readers, who presumably know him because of his (according to the article) Raymond Chandler-influenced sci fi. I'm willing to bet those people are not put off by some swearing. :-)
If you are trying to make a living writing you should a) be fucking reading and b) appreciate all the wild and wonderful facets of language.. like using a good cuss word for deliberately over the top emphasis.
So you don’t agree with his one golden rule for becoming a better writer?
Operating these little diskettes that load programs straight into the receiver’s brain.
I feel like Joseph Goebbels of fictional worlds. Writing a code that will smoothly execute delusion - “This is real, this really could happen. I want to see where it goes next.”
If words are just source code for human brain then I wonder, when using an LLM - do you really program it or does it rather program you?